Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

Transferred or metaphorical meaning was indicated by the use of a variation in the vowel sound of the noun. “Kăr” with long, broad vowel is “dust”; “Kăr” with short vowel implies the sporadic ideas that float in a civilisation or community or period or mind; and all the various grammatical and sense modifications of the original concrete noun were applicable to the new noun with the transferred sense.

The grammatical framework of the language was so simple that I mastered it in a few days. A few more days sufficed to get familiar with what they called the infant’s vocabulary, all the concrete words for common things, like earth, rock, sea, sky, food, arm, hand, head, light, fire, smoke, cloud. What made this easier was that words for things that had a close resemblance or connection in action had the same consonantal sound but different vowels, or the same vowel and one consonantal variation; “foresight” was “lum”; “fore-energy” was “lim”; “rum” was “gravitation,” “rim,” “force”; “lul,” “smoke,” “lil,” “cloud.” When I passed to the youth’s vocabulary of less concrete words or words with metaphorical applications, it was more difficult, partly because the vocabulary was larger, partly because the differences were subtler; but I was greatly aided by the universal and primary law of their tongue, that the same sound should not stand for more than one meaning or shade of meaning; whenever a word tended to acquire a new sense, a new modification of the form was deliberately invented and adopted. Thus there were none of the ambiguities and shifting senses that make all other languages and especially the European like a quagmire or quicksand. One of the more important annual functions of the community as a whole was language sanitation.

It is one of the greatest mistakes of European civilisation to let words take their own course, the most dangerous source of spiritual epidemics. In them lurk foul thoughts and suggestions that spread their moral contagion as soon as the child comes into contact with their inner meanings. Nothing is so pernicious, so obstructive of progress, as the virus of uncleansed words. They let out on new ages moral diseases that have been forgotten. In them contagious germs adhere to the nooks and corners for generations as in old houses. Even the fallacies that cling to the human mind from the many and shifting senses of words are bad enough, but worse is the opportunity they give for villains to palter with them. Nothing is easier than in our old civilisations to betray the innocent; language with its chameleon nature can fit itself to every atmosphere and light; it gives the readiest shelter to dishonesty and error. Unpurified, undefined, it is the quaking bog in which half the souls that are born into the world are irrecoverably lost.

Ages ago his countrymen had taken their language in hand, and swept out of it all foul suggestion. Now their chief task was to prevent ambiguities and double or shifting meanings from creeping into words and making them the cloaks of dishonest purpose, the stumbling-blocks of the still feeble human soul. There were linguistic specialists whose duties were to watch the use of words by the community and note down those that were changing their signification. They had also to invent new words to fit the new meanings, and to lay the results of their investigations before the meeting of the whole nation. Whatever were unanimously adopted became at once a part of the language; and for those that were rejected the experts had to bring forward other suggestions.

The result was that their language was as limpid as their own thoughts; and it was kept musical too. After the linguists had made out lists of suggested substitutes, they submitted them to the imaginative men and the musicians; through this ordeal, and that of the meeting of the people, none but noble words could pass; and for words that had to cover new ideas in some department of science or art the linguists had to consult with the scientists or artists. This people thought no trouble lost that was spent on ennobling the garment of thought and the master-element of music and imaginative work. “All is false, if words are uncertain,” “Language is the ether of thought; it interpenetrates all existence,” were two of their favourite maxims. Another that was often on the lips of Noola was: “Take care of the words, and the thoughts will take care of themselves.”

It was little wonder then that I found it easy to master the primary stages of this most translucent language. The stage of full manhood and the stage of the wise, I could see from a few illustrations he gave me, had difficulties and subtleties that could be mastered only by long acquaintance; and it was not till I had been many years in Limanora that I came to understand them; for, though the vocabularies were constructed on the most symmetrical and clear plan, they had as many words as all the languages of Europe put together. Most of them stood for ideas or elements that were beyond European thought or discovery, or for ideas that were, many of them, fagoted together under a single word in our Western languages. No idea, no shade of an idea was without its own word. Half the false starts of European civilisation or science or philosophy were due to misunderstandings caused by the number of meanings that attach to single words. European controversies and discussions are interminable owing to this fertile source of fallacy and of shifting ground. I was not surprised at the small progress made by both old and modern civilisations after I saw the trouble the Limanorans took to purify and define their words, and the ease with which one could master the most difficult thought expressed in their limpid language. As I tell you my story now in your own and my native tongue, I feel as if I wandered in a dream through a land of mists that are ever shifting and deceiving. I have often to abandon the attempt to explain to you the noblest of the Limanoran ideas. At other times I have to translate clear expressions into muddy, uncertain words, or to resort to makeshifts that, I fear, give you but little notion of the originals. As I talk with you in your English tongue, I seem to be moving amid illusions and phantoms. How unmelodious it all sounds! A language like the Limanoran needed no poets; it was poetry itself, so musical was every word and every combination of words, so bright and strong, so suggestive and harmonious every idea that needed expression in it. When an Englishman is able to choose the musical words of his language and put them together with rhythmic harmony expressive of the inner harmony of the ideas, he is canonised as a linguistic saint, a poet. The Limanorans were poets by virtue of their language and their nature and training, and it is like passing into the most commonplace of prose to express even their commonest words and ideas in the most poetical English.

Little though Noola taught me, I was enamoured of it, and could scarcely keep from crooning the words to myself, like the lilt of an old song. And every sentence seemed to be as melodious as the separate words. I tried to form discordant combinations, but, on presenting them to my tutor, I found that they bore no sense; they were impossible combinations of ideas. Especially was the harmony of sound predominant in the higher stages of the language. The commonest description of even the most difficult scientific investigation sounded like a noble blank verse poem. To speak in English again, much though it brings back out of my oldest past, is to walk in fetters.

Before Noola was satisfied that I could make myself understood in Limanoran, and just as he had perfected his plan for our projection into the beach waters of his native land, we had aroused suspicion in the garrison by our long colloquies. They watched our every movement. Nor did I allay their fears by my assurance that we were about to attempt a landing on Kayoss by sea. We were seized and sent to the capital to be dealt with by the king and his council. Long debate and threatening civil war delayed the decision, but I am certain that the result would have been condemnation to death in the end, for the whole country was honeycombed with suspicions and fears of plots; and executions of suspects occurred every day.

But the unexpected rescued us. We lay in our prison cells, weary, half expectant, half wishing more delay. Our food was thrust in to us day after day through a small aperture in the iron doors of our pitiless stone-walled dungeons. At first we heard through the narrow iron-railed slit that served as a window the hurry and bustle of the city, like the sound of a distant torrent. One day it seemed to grow less and less, and at last it ceased. The silence was oppressive and ominous. Next morning the wicket aperture in our door did not open. All day we were without food. We wondered what had occurred. Four days threw their twilight into our cells, and not a sound of human voice approached us. I felt my hunger pass from the gnawing stage into languor and collapse. I sank on my reed pallet unable longer to pace my floor. I swooned rather than slept when twilight thickened into gloom. I knew that a few days at most must end the alternations of collapse and consciousness. I dreamt that I was back in the old fishing village in my mother’s hut on the cliff; and her voice sounded sweet in my ears, as she welcomed me home at night. I thought that I fell asleep in it and that the morning had come. I remembered that my comrades were to call me and that we were to start early on a long fishing excursion. I moved uneasily, half conscious that I ought to rise and see if the dawn had broken; and then it seemed to me that the hum of voices sounded in the distance. “It is my friends,” I said; a loud rattle and clang, I thought, must be their volley of stones on the roof and windows to waken me. Then I heard their Scotch accents beside me. I must awaken. With an effort I rose and jumped from my bed. The cold of the prison floor brought me to consciousness. There beside me was my captain, Alec Burns, with some of his men. I sank back on my pallet in a swoon after a sign of recognition. They applied restoratives, and in half an hour, though faint and weak, I was able to totter out on the arms of two of my sailors into the passage and thence into the sunshine. Under an awning I lay panting back into life, and nursing and liquid sustenance gave me appetite, and made me strong enough to walk alone.

I asked Burns for an explanation of all that had occurred. The royal officers were about to seize the Daydream, he discovered, and he was intending to put out to sea in the night. He had got up steam and was about to heave the anchors, but he found that she had grounded, as it was low tide. As her screw moved, the water gave forth an unbearable stench. He stopped her and the fetid odour disappeared. In the morning he looked out to the city, and saw the streets and the ramparts completely deserted. Not a being moved anywhere. All day the same death-like stillness prevailed. No boat moved in the harbour; no soldier appeared on the battlements; not a sound of marching or of military music was heard. It might have been a city of the dead. The following day opened with the same experience. They pulled on shore, and the streets echoed empty to their step, as they walked up from the beach. They knocked at doors, but received no answer. They entered houses, and passed through them unmolested, unchallenged. At last the explanation forced itself upon their senses. In one house they could not proceed for the fetor that met them at their entrance; and in the next lane they saw dead bodies strewn, as if cast from the windows, in some places heaped high above the earth. It was a city of the unburied dead, and no living creature was to be seen to bury them.